George Rekers

When a hypocrite like George Rekers gets caught with a prostitute, we delight in this homophobic crusaders’ downfall. But here’s how exposing bigots like this helps the side of equality.

First, Miami New Times, a sister publication of Dallas Observer, broke the story when a friend of the rentboy figured out who the john was and met them at the airport and took pictures.

Since then, Rekers’ hypocracy has been unraveling.

In an article in today’sMiami Herald entitled “Physician Heal Thyself,” Leonard Pitts used the case to prove that homosexuality cannot be “cured.” If it could, he would have “cured” himself.

To anger his mainstream audience, Pitts pointed out that Florida taxpayers paid for the rentboy. Rekers recently received $120,000 from the state for testifying as an “expert” witness in the on-going case defending Florida’s ban on adoptions by same-sex couples.

He called Rekers’ actions a “moral crime.”

Put yourself in the shoes of the teenager, bewildered and frightened by these feelings he or she is not “supposed” to have, feelings of sexual attraction to people of the same gender. You try to deny them, try to ignore them, try to suppress them, but they will not go away. You are all alone, isolated behind a secret that presses down on you like weights, a fear of rejection that haunts you like ghosts.

He called it hypocrisy preying on the most vulnerable. He called it sad and said, “ours is a culture that would encourage and reward such duplicity in the first place.”